| Guido van der Werve’s videos, currently on show at the Hayward Gallery, are the kind of thing art writers describe as ‘hilarious’, although they’re only hilarious in an art way, meaning that any laughs that do come are snorty expulsions easy to mistake for symptoms of the cold that everyone seems to have at the moment. I think van der Werve knows his work is only funny in a limited way, the sort of intentionally weak gags coming soon to a Christmas cracker near you. | 
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Ben Street for Art Review
Courtesy of Art Review.Guido van der Werve’s videos, currently on show at the Hayward Gallery, are the kind of thing art writers describe as ‘hilarious’, although they’re only hilarious in an art way, meaning that any laughs that do come are snorty expulsions easy to mistake for symptoms of the cold that everyone seems to have at the moment. I think van der Werve knows his work is only funny in a limited way, the sort of intentionally weak gags coming soon to a Christmas cracker near you.
His video Nummer acht, everything is going to be alright (2008; the titles are a little precious: one is even called Nummer twee) – shown this summer at Manifesta – is literally an ice-breaker: the artist himself, about five inches tall on a huge screen, walks, in a slightly worrisome amble, in front of a huge icebreaker in an otherwise featureless expanse of grey arctic sky. The ship, a big, rusting, beat-up behemoth, splits open the ice immediately behind the artist; the cracks and gulps are amplified.
Whatever kinship it has with the great artist-loner-Romantics of the art historical past (Caspar David Friedrich and Bas Jan Ader are never not mentioned in any text about van der Werve, and I’m not about to start bucking tradition now), what the film really is is a ten-minute sight gag worthy of Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton. (I kept thinking of the scene in Keaton’s The General (1927) when he sits on the front of the steam train, frantically knocking off planks of wood lying on the line). As in slapstick films, van der Werve pits a protagonist against big, dumb, inexorable modern things, and watches him mess up. The ship is to van der Werve what the clock tower was to Lloyd, or the train to Keaton: the visualised straight man, the sounding board for self-deprecating tomfoolery.
In the second van der Werve film showing at the Hayward, another ‘big black thing in continuous movement’ (as the artist described it in a recent interview with curator Tom Morton) provides a kind of counterpoint to the slim, black-clad figure of the artist: a Steinway piano. The contrast between a big, heavy, unbelievably cumbersome thing and its capacity for beauty and grace (the ship has a similar contradictory presence) has a comic and artistic heritage as long as your arm, and the generosity and elegance of van der Werve’s work allows apparently contradictory allusions to coexist to mutual advantage. I never thought I’d be reminded of Richard Serra and Laurel and Hardy at the same time, but nummer zes: Steinway grand piano. Wake me up to go to sleep and all the colors of the rainbow (2006) plays elaborate, melancholy games with ideas of lightness and weight in the same way as both of them. The voiceover describes the history of the Steinway piano over a series of scenes of the artist looking glum in bleak bits of Amsterdam. In a scene that might be a dream, a piano is lifted by crane into the artist’s second-floor flat; he then plays Chopin’s Piano Concerto No.1 in E minor Op.11 (Van der Werve is a classically trained pianist), accompanied by a small orchestra. Once he finishes, the apartment immediately empties, and a rainbow appears on the wall. It’s less cutesy than it sounds, although van der Werve, unlike some of his contemporaries, doesn’t flinch from the Romantic flourish.
